Saigon (89 page)

It was just after two o’clock in the morning when Joseph’s telephone finally rang and he recognized the voice of the Cholon Chinese the moment he picked up the receiver. 

“Comrade Trinh arrived in Saigon seven hours ago,” he announced in a neutral voice. “She traveled all the way from Hanoi by truck. She’s a member of Infiltration Brigade Nineteen now in place at Bien Hoa Bridge. She’s been contacted and told to wait. Nineteen Brigade has concealed itself in a concrete culvert a hundred yards south of the bridge. You’ll find her there if you go 

now.” - 

The line clicked and went dead without any further formality, and Joseph grabbed the little waiter by the arm and rushed him down the stairs. Crouched in the front passenger seat of the Pontiac, the waiter held on to the dashboard tightly with both hands and every so often he lingered the little wedge of hundred- dollar bills that Joseph had pushed into the breast pocket of his white jacket to persuade him to accompany him. In his Ben Cat headquarters, General Dung, the Communist field commander, had already given the final order to attack Saigon at midnight precisely: “Make deep thrusts! Advance to the predetermined points!” he had told his forces proudly and the artillery batteries brought up from the coast had immediately begun raining 130-millimeter shells on the Tan Son Nhut headquarters of South Vietnam’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

The noise of this continuous artillery barrage became deafening as Joseph guided the Pontiac carefully through the refugees swarming into the northeastern suburbs, but as lie drove he noticed the flame trees in his headlights and remembered that this was the same road out of the city along which his father, Chuck and himself had traveled with Jacques Devraux on that first hunting trip half a century before; now, however, the road was choked with abandoned jeeps and trucks left there by fleeing ARVN troops who had perhaps begun to realize that most of their generals had already fled to the ships of the U.S. Seventh Fleet anchored off Vung Tau. Because of the panic and confusion the short drive took Joseph more than half an hour, and the hands of his watch showed two forty-five AM. when he extinguished the headlights and swung the car off the road a quarter of a mile short of the Bien Hoa Bridge. As he leaned across and pushed open the passenger door, the little waiter was still fingering his wad of American bills, possibly agonizing over whether the risk he was about to take was worth it. 

“Take off your white jacket — or you’ll be visible a mile away,” said Joseph sharply. “Put the money in your trouser pocket if you want to take it with you. But hurry.” He helped the Vietnamese pull the jacket off his shoulders, then pushed him out into the darkness. “The culvert is about a hundred yards from the bridge! Call her name softly — ‘Comrade Dang Thi Trinh’ —- and hurry!” 

“Dang Thi Trinh — okay.” The little waiter repeated the name in a frightened voice then scampered away into the darkness. 

Looking through the windshield, Joseph found he could see beyond the bridge, not more than a mile or two away, a long column of North Vietnamese trucks and tanks advancing confidently with their headlights blazing. As he watched the spearhead move nearer he was seized with a sudden fear; the waiter would simply disappear into the darkness with the money and keep running — back in the direction of Saigon! What a fool he’d been! For ten minutes he sat behind the wheel in an agony of suspense; he was sure that an American revealing himself to a Communist infiltration team so close to the battle zone would be taken captive, but he knew he would have to take the risk and try to find Trinh himself if the waiter didn’t reappear. He looked at his wristwatch every few moments as the minutes ticked by and he had opened the driver’s door and was climbing out of the car to begin creeping towards the culvert when two shadows materialized silently from the darkness beside him. 

“It’s us, Mr. Sherman,” whispered the waiter shakily. “Here’s Comrade Trinh.” 

Joseph clapped the waiter ecstatically on the shoulder and bundled him into the back of the Pontiac; then he led the other figure towards the front passenger seat. She turned to face him as he opened the door for her, and in the red glow from the fires raging beyond the city he saw that her face was strained but composed. She wore the dusty black trousers and tunic of a peasant but her straw hat was pushed back on her shoulders and her hair fell loose about her cheeks. His heart lurched when he saw how she had grown into a young woman of seventeen; she looked back at him wide-eyed, her expression apprehensive and shy, her features combining unmistakably traces of Lan’s beauty and Tuyet’s proud strength. He resisted a fierce urge to throw his arms around her, and instead said softly in Vietnamese: “Trinh, I’m so happy that I’ve found you in time.” 

She looked at him anxiously for a moment, then turned her gaze in the direction of the advancing North Vietnamese tanks. “I’m very glad, too — but we must hurry, mustn’t we?” 

Joseph smiled and motioned her into the car. “Don’t worry. We’ll make it all right.” 

He ran to the driver’s door, slipped behind the wheel again and turned quickly in the direction of the city. He had to sound the Pontiac’s horn continuously to clear a path through the running crowds, and when the car was under way he lifted his wrist close to his face; the glow of the fires, bright, enough to drive by, was also sufficient to illuminate his watch dial, and he saw that it showed just after three. “There’s still time for us to get to my embassy — and there we’ll find a helicopter to fly out of Vietnam.” 

As he drove he felt a light touch on his arm and turned his head to find Trinh’s fingers on his sleeve; she had a wondering look in her eyes and she removed her hand with a little embarrassed smile when she found him looking at her. 

Inside the United States Embassy on Thong Nhut Boulevard at that moment the last American ambassador to Saigon was folding the United States flag and tucking it into a plastic bag to carry with him to the ships of the Seventh Fleet. His face was gray and crumpled in the aftermath of a debilitating attack of pneumonia, and he watched anxiously as the giant CH-53 helicopters continued to sweep into the embassy compound to pick up fresh loads of evacuees. Their pilots now were red-eyed with fatigue and the five or six hundred Vietnamese still waiting seemed to sense that the end of the airlift might be approaching. From the rooftop pad smaller CH-47 helicopters were evacuating the last of the thousand or so embassy staff and their dependents but not many remained by three-fifteen AM., and those still waiting stood around in irresolute little groups on an upper floor inside the Chancery watching with dismay the final defeat and humiliation of their country and its Asian ally. 

Naomi Boyce-Lewis waited with them, rarely leaving her place by the windows; she scanned the streets outside constantly, watching for a sign of Joseph, but as her turn to leave drew near, she was ushered firmly into a line drawn up before an internal stairwell. She tried to hang back but the diplomats around her confided that in Washington President Ford was becoming increasingly impatient with the ambassador’s reluctance to wind up “Operation Frequent Wind.” The embassy’s secret communications equipment was being smashed, they told her, and the last direct messages had already been sent to Washington. The helicopter radio links with the commanders of the Seventh Fleet were the only surviving channels of contact between Saigon and Washington, and orders were expected from the White House at any time, they said, to curtail the airlift as soon as the last U.S. diplomat was airborne. After that there was no certainty that anybody else would get out. 

Naomi took a last look Out of the window then reluctantly moved up the stairwell behind the other waiting Americans. When she stepped out onto the Chancery roof it was almost four AM. and the CH-47 that was to take her and twenty-four others to the U.S.S. Blue Ridge, the flagship of the evacuation fleet, was just settling onto the pad. Because time was precious it did not cut its rotors, and they continued to spin as Marine guards urged the first group of passengers forward into its open hatches. Suddenly Naomi realized that from the top of the six-story building she could see the rivers of North Vietnamese armor flowing down the two main highways towards Saigon with their driving lights shining, and her heart sank; then in the next instant she lowered her gaze to the street outside the embassy walls and saw Joseph’s Pontiac nosing through the crowd towards the side gate. 

The desperate Vietnamese were swarming frenziedly around the slow-moving car, imagining somehow that it might be their last chance of salvation, and Naomi stepped aside to let other diplomats board the helicopter ahead of her. Her hand Hew to her mouth when she saw a dozen or more youths scramble onto the Pontiac’s roof, hoping to spring from there over the gate when it got near enough. Others smashed at its windows, and gradually the dense throng halted the car. In their anger they began rocking it and Naomi let out a little cry when it toppled slowly onto its side. Men and boys attacked it with their feet, shattering its windshield and side windows, and it was then that Naomi saw for the first time the terrified face of Trinh as she struggled to force open the passenger door that was suddenly above her head. 

Inside the car, the screams of the crowd were deafening; Joseph, who had fallen awkwardly when the car went over, was fighting to free his legs from the controls and trying to calm Trinh at the same time. As she began trying to climb out of the car he seized her arm, motioning for her to wait, and pulled his passport from inside his jacket. “If we become separated, show this to the soldiers on the top of the wall and they’ll let you in,” he yelled, thrusting it into her hand. 

She nodded frantically and clambered out of the wrecked car clutching the passport. The crowd had begun to surge wildly back arid forth and almost at once she was carried away from him along the foot of the wall. A volley of shots rang out from among the crowd, directed at the helicopter that had just landed on top of the Chancery, and this was greeted with hysterical cheers; then the heavier bark of a machine gun firing from a roof on the other side of Thong Nhut suddenly broke in on the clamor and half-a- dozen men and women crumpled to the ground, As Joseph pulled himself from the Pontiac screams of “Viet Cong! Viet Cong!” rose all around him and there was a concerted rush at the walls. The American Marines standing shoulder to shoulder on the parapet, wearing flak jackets and steel helmets, stamped on the climbers’ hands with their heavy combat boots and brandished their bayonets, and again the crowd fell back screaming abuse. The Cobra gunship that had been hovering overhead suddenly dropped like a hawk and the roar of its multi-barreled weapons blotted out everything else for several seconds while it fired at the Communist machine gun nest on the rooftop opposite. 

In the thick of the crowd Joseph craned his neck in desperation, trying to spot Trinh, but he couldn’t see her. Then he heard a distant voice shrieking his name, and he looked up to see Naomi gesticulating frantically from the Chancery roof. She was pointing along the wall, and following her directions, he saw Trinh scrambling up a lightpole with two of three other youths. He shouldered his way through the crowd and began climbing the same lattice-iron stanchion; halfway up, he found himself gasping for breath and lie stopped. As lie rested he saw a Marine guard appear above him, and the soldier clubbed savagely at the two Vietnamese youths ahead of Trinh with his M-16 to clear the way for Joseph. They fell backwards with a yell, sweeping Trinh to the ground, and she rose sobbing and holding her arms beseechingly towards Joseph. 

“Ong ngoai! Ong ngoai!” she screamed, reverting in her despair to “Grandpapa,” the childish term of endearment she had first used for him seven years before in the sampan on the River of Perfumes, “Vui long giup toi! — Please help me!” 

The Marine was calling repeatedly for Joseph to climb up alone but he ignored him and leaned back into the crowd, stretching out his arms towards Trinh. She tried to grab his hand, but the fear-crazed mob surged wildly around her and she was swept away. The Cobra gunship which had failed to silence the Viet Cong machine gun had begun dropping flares to expose its position, and by their ghostly light Joseph saw her struggling to her feet again. Feeling his strength ebbing he decided not to venture back into the melee; instead he yelled her name repeatedly and waved her in his direction. When she saw him she began fighting her way towards the light stanchion once more, but before she reached it a dark blob flew in an arc above the heads of the ‘crowd. The flash of the grenade exploding blinded Joseph for a few seconds and when his vision cleared he saw Trinh lying still among the mass of bodies crumpled on the pavement. 

From the top of the Chancery, Naomi couldn’t see what had happened outside the compound, but from the hunched, rigid position of Joseph’s body as he clung to the lightpole she sensed that something was wrong. At that moment a yelling Marine grabbed her by the shoulders and hustled her towards the open door of the helicopter that was waiting to leave. She tried to struggle and shouted for him to release her but her words were torn away in the noise of the helicopter’s fast-spinning rotor blades. In the end he lifted her bodily into the aircraft alongside the other passengers and slammed the door. As the helicopter shuddered into the air she saw Joseph release his hold on the lightpole and slip back into the crowd, and she buried her face in her hands. 

When Joseph reached Trinh’s side she was lying quite still, with her eyes closed, but there was no sign of injury on her face or body. With the growing pandemonium of the Communist bombardment filling his ears, he knelt to pick her up and, summoning his fading strength, he staggered back to the foot of the wall. The explosion of the grenade had scattered the crowd and he signaled to a Marine sergeant on top of the gate to take Trinh from him. The sergeant leaned down and hauled her over the gate with one arm before passing her to one of his waiting men inside; then he climbed down to help Joseph scramble over.